RAF Steamer Point

There are two main
concentrations of RAF units in Aden Colony – at Steamer Point, where the
original garrison was set up and where Headquarters, Middle East (Aden) Command
are situated, and Khormaksar, where the airport is the natural centre for
operational units. RAF Khormaksar and RAF Steamer Point are run as two separate
stations, self-accounting for cash and equipment.

RAF Steamer Point
provides the administrative services for most of the units in the base area –
roughly, in the “boot” of the peninsula. Its Commanding Officer is, therefore,
responsible for a diverse group of units – the RAF Aden Communi­cations Centre,
No. 114 Maintenance Unit, the Aden Supplies Depot, 50 Movement Unit, the HQ
Provost and Security Services (which are responsible for enforcing service
discipline and keeping down crime throughout the Colony), the staff at Command
HQ, the RAF Hospital, the Aden Protectorate Levies Hospital, No. 7 Anti-Malarial
Unit (which is responsible for anti-mosquito operations throughout the Command)
and one Army unit, No. 222 Signals Squadron, which mans the telephone exchange
and maintains landlines up-country.

Administrative
responsibility for all these involves dealing with their accom­modation,
messing, welfare, pay and supplies, education, clerical services, personnel,medical treatment, motor transport, ground defence,
fire and police, maintenance and repairs to buildings. The administration of all
“hirings” – the houses and flats rented by the Air Ministry to supplement
married quarters – occupied by both RAF and Army, in the Colony, is another
Steamer Point responsibility.

Big building
programme

With almost every
unit developing and expanding, Steamer Point has a big programme of building and
modernisation on its hands. To the 20 or so married quarters of the old type,
new blocks giving 48 more flats have recently been added. Four modern
air-conditioned barrack blocks, each accommodating 150 airmen in cubicles, have
been completed on the Maidan, next to the sports fields. They supple­ment the
old, but well-provisioned, blocks built high on Chapel Hill to catch every
pleasant cooling breeze from the sea. The Airmen’s Mess on the hill is due to be
replaced by a new air-conditioned building near the new barracks.

The Sergeants’ Mess
on Barrack Hill is again an old type building, but its site, beside giving fine
views across the harbour, ensures some breezes to relieve the trying hot weather
conditions, and this is helped by airy construction and plenty of fans.

The Officers’ Mess
occupies one of the finest positions in the Colony, overlooking Telegraph Bay at
Tarshyne. An attractive feature is its large patio for sitting out of doors –
also providing a ready-made dance floor.

Communications
Centre

Serving the unified
HQ of Middle East (Aden) Command, the RAF Communications Centre provides the
communications for all three Services – to-date the only example of one service
doing this for all. Until recently the Centre was quite a small affair, but is
undergoing a face-lift and re-equipment that will make it the most modern of its
kind under the British flag. On its radio teleprinters come and go messages from
Cyprus, Bahrein, the UK, East Africa and, until recently, the Sudan and Somalia.
No longer are outgoing mess­ages typed by operators – they are transcribed on to
punched tapes and fed into the automatic teleprinters which transmit them faster
than any operator. Transmissions to certain other areas are in hand-speed morse.

The transmitting and
receiving stations are both remote from the Centre and each other, though
controlled from the centre. This is to prevent the transmitters “deafening”, so
to speak, their own receivers – and also to protect the latter from
inter­ference from mere domestic appliances, which could happen if they were
near the Centre in a built-up area like Steamer Point.

A busy telephone
exchange – for the whole of the headquarters and Steamer Point – handles 350
calls an hour for each operator’s position, so that no operator stays on duty
for more than an hour without a break.

No. 114 MU

If you hear the cry
“Up the MOO!” on Aden sports fields, do not fear an encounter with a sacred cow
– this is simply a shout of support for No. 114 Maintenance Unit teams.
Seriously, wherever you are or whatever your connection with the Services in
Aden, you are bound to hear of the MU and benefit from its work. No. 114
Maintenance Unit is an RAF Equipment Depot, supplying all manner of equipment to
RAF and, to a limited extent, Army and Navy units in the Command. “Equipment”
means everything from a pound of nails to a radio vehicle, from curtains to
coffins. Spares and tools for planes, motor vehicles and motor launches, tyres
and radio transmitters, films and paint – and also cots and cushions, crockery
and plastic basins – have their place in its storehouses.

Making more space for
more goods is the continual problem, so the storekeepers are continually
re-arranging and re-packing, like tidy housewives. And lettering and numbering
on racks and bins, and a card index system, ensures that a small item, like half
a dozen paintbrushes, can be quickly found in a hangar piled 20 feet high.
Sub-sites at Isthmus (near Khormaksar) and Cemetery Valley ease the congestion
at the small main depot at Steamer Point – site, incidentally, of the original
Aden Stores Depot in the 1920s.

Quite a lot of the
equipment 114 MU makes – it has blacksmiths, sheet metal­workers, carpenters and
a fabric shop, which makes curtains (26,287 of them in the last year) and
cushion covers. In one as yet unmechanised department half a dozen cobblers sit
crosslegged repairing 700 pairs of boots and shoes a month. Most interesting to
service families, perhaps, would be the stores which house furniture – beds,
chairs, tables, bookcases, desks, cupboards, dressing tables, crockery, cutlery,
bedding, plastic bowls and buckets, vacuum cleaners and scrubbing brushes – in
fact, all the domestic equipment for barracks, messes, schools, married quarters
and hirings.

RAF Hospital

One of the oldest
buildings in Aden is the RAF Hospital, perched high on the hill above Steamer
Point. In fact, its origins are lost in history – there is a story that it was
built by the Turks – but it was an Indian Medical Service Hospital before the
RAF took over in 1922 and must be nearly 100 years old. Its age, and the fact
that it is a collection of buildings on different levels, make it very difficult
to run as an efficient modern hospital, yet help to give it a charm and a
friendliness that few antiseptically modern buildings can match. Its builders
under­stood how to achieve coolness in a hot climate, with high ceilings and
deep, shaded verandahs on every side, and its high position ensures that it
feels every sea breeze.

This 180-bed hospital
serves all British Forces in the Aden Protectorate, and their families, and also
merchant seamen of all nationalities. It is a staging post for the aero-medical
service (Casevac) from the Far East, so that twice a month a plane-load of
casualties spends a night there before going on to the UK, while casualties for
the twice- or thrice-monthly Aden-UK-direct Casevac are collected there. Usually
there are 120-130 patients in the hospital, rarely less than 100.

The expansion
programme involves the hospital, too, and a new 40-bed block is being built. The
idea is that this will mean it is no longer necessary for patients to have their
beds on the verandahs – but, in fact, most patients on approaching
con­valescence prefer to be outside where they can watch the superb view of the
harbour. At any rate, the additional beds should help to ease the strain on the
present 50 available for women and children. This includes a 12-bed maternity
unit – a pleasant bungalow on the highest level of the hospital – where about 15
babies are born each month. Another bungalow on the same level is an isolation
wing for women and children, the majority of patients being dysentery sufferers.

Next come the kitchen
block, another women’s ward – whose staff, with their offices in another wing a
few feet lower down the hill where they have other patients, lead an energetic
life on the stairs – and a “bridge” to the upper floor of the main hospital.
Surgical patients and operating theatres have the first floor, outpatients, and
stores the ground level, then administrative offices and the laboratory are
separate buildings below again.

The hospital is
manned by RAF Medical Service doctors and orderlies, Princess Mary’s Royal Air
Force Nursing Service sisters and WRAF orderlies.

Supply depot

Imagine a thousand
had of cattle, 4,100 sheep, 2,772 pigs, 48,000 rabbits and 40,000 chickens –
that is the amount of meat eaten by British Forces in Aden in the course of a
year. And sausages – a year’s supply would make a string 120 miles long, from
London to Nottingham. The RAF Aden Supply Depot, which is responsible for the
feeding of all the RAF and Army units in the Colony and Protectorate, plus
visiting Royal Navy ships and the Aden Protectorate Levies is used to dealing
with food and marketing in astronomical quantities.

In a single month
they provide 4,500 gallons of ice-cream, 14,000 pounds of apples, 7,000 lb.
bananas, 12,000 lb. oranges, 10,000 lb. carrots, 10,000 lb. cabbage and 12,000
lb. tomatoes. These fresh fruits and vegetables come in from Italy, Egypt,
Ethiopia, Kenya and also from the Protectorate, but in a climate where a lettuce
wilts in three hours storage is a king-sized nightmare. In fact, the depot has
50,000 cubic feet of refrigerated space, only a small part of the total it uses
for food stocks, and the ice plant which it controls produces 160 50-lb. blocks
of ice every day – 2,920,000 lb. in a year, or enough to make a fair-sized
skating rink!

The Supply Depot was
taken over by the RAF from the Royal Indian Army Corps in the latter part of
1946 and, with the growth of the three services in this area, has naturally
mushroomed until it is now the largest RAF Supply Depot in the world.

Once the depot had
its own dairy farm, at Isthmus, where there grazed a herd of Friesian cows,
first brought in by the Indian Army. The herd provided milk for all service
families and units and some civilians, and it was with some feeling that it
closed down in 1955 owing to a continued financial loss. Today, fresh milk is
flown in daily by air services from Kenya and is available at shops and NAAFI,
while the RAF provides fresh milk for school children and hospital patients.

The depot has its own
bakery, and 2,500 loaves leave its ovens daily – but extensive modernisation is
planned for it, so it will soon provide sliced and wrapped loaves. Much of the
food served in the messes is undoubtedly British in origin – helping to make the
menus familiar, “just like home”.

But one of the Supply
Depot’s little problems is feeding the Aden Protectorate Levies. Their meat –
2,232 sheep and 2,540 goats – have to be supplied alive, so that they can be
killed halal fashion according to the tenets of the Muslim religion. The
Arab troops also require native-type vegetables with such exotic names as kulfa,
kohl rabi and brinjals – and one which is known, even on official order forms,
as “ladiesfingers.”

The depot deals in
astronomical quantities, but they are perhaps proudest of one very small figure
– that of dehydrated vegetables. The measure of their success in providing fresh
vegetables, in the face of considerable difficulty, is that only 2½ oz. of the
dried commodity are supplied per man per week in the Command.

50 Movement Unit

For every RAF man,
especially if he has a family, the work of 50 Movement Unit has real personal
importance. This unit is responsible for baggage – unloading the heavier items
brought with you by sea and delivering them to a man’s unit, forwarding baggage
to stations outside the Colony, dealing with unaccompanied baggage that follows
families travelling by air. And, of course, shipping the whole lot back again at
the end of your tour. The Unit is responsible for every Service item that enters
and leaves Aden by sea – Servicemen, their families and domestic goods, and
cargo of all kinds. It is the largest organisation of its kind run by the RAF.
In the course of a year it works on nearly 600 cargo ships and more than 150
passenger ships, and for the loading and unloading of passengers and cargo has
on call a fleet of Arab ferry-boats and lighters.

WRAF

Aden being an area
where there are many young, single men and few unattached girls, the small
complement of WRAF are in great demand for social functions and can lead a very
gay social life if they wish. Their own regular dances, to which each girl can
ask two guests, have a certain exclusiveness.

There are about 50
girls, but their trades and work are very varied. They include clerks, typists
and shorthand typists, telephonists and skilled telegraphists working at HQ MEC,
RAF Steamer Point and the Communications Centre, storewomen working with 114
Maintenance Unit, nursing orderlies at the hospital, a dental hygienist and a
dental surgery attendant, and a PT instructor. The half-dozen officers belong to
equally varied departments – intelligence, signals, personnel and accounts, at
present. One airwoman is a hairdresser by trade and plies her trade three
mornings and three afternoons a week at the WRAF quarters for the benefit of her
colleagues, RAF wives and civilian employees.

The girls have their
quarters in a self-contained enclosure on sloping ground above Telegraph Bay,
not far from the Officers’ Mess, and the officers’ bungalow is just up the hill.

The long, low
buildings, bright with paint, surround a circular shrubbery and fountain pool
set below the wide patio in front of the big dining and sitting rooms. Airwomen
sleep in dormitories with up to nine beds, junior and senior NCOs have single
cubicles. All rooms have ceiling fans, and there are plans for increased
air-conditioning – already rooms used by girls who have to work night shifts
have it. Senior NCOs have a pleasant small mess of their own, and both this and
the Airwomen’s Mess have refrigerators for personal belongings that need to be
kept cool.